Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

Durham Light Infantry

"Are there any regiments that are more... effeminate than others?... What I really wanted was a regiment where I can be really quiet and have more time to myself to work with fabrics and creating new concepts in interior design."

So speaks Eric Idle, trying to get recruited into the army in this old Monty Python clip:



I've just been watching a Panorama report on the amount of British soldiers going AWOL. I sometimes wonder if the whole concept of the army, in this litiginous day and age, is not completely anachronistic. The Panorama programme was focusing on how issues of mental health in soldiers (post-traumatic stress disorder, mainly) are ignored or not taken seriously. I've seen this kind of report before. There is a fundamental contradiction here. On the one hand the army absolutely requires killing machines. On the other, in this day and age, they have to be seen to care about their 'employees'. And yet, none of the reports I have seen address this fundamental question - how is a job in which people are required to kill other people even tenable? It seems that it is impossible to acknowledge that the values of army life are simply not what are publicly touted as modern values. And yet, truly to take on those values would surely mean the end of the army.

Labels: Monty Python, the army